*Note - NSB stands for neuroscience and behavior -a 9 week introductory course on neuroanatomy, neurophysiology with and some clinical neurology, psychiatry, and neurosurgery.
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NSB lecturer guide:
Please adhere to the following guidelines when giving
lectures for NSB. These are general trends
which I have noticed over the last few years in terms of best practices and
things to avoid if possible. In general,
please remember that these are students who have spent the last year and a half
going to lots of lectures. Things which
seem trivial to you as you only do one or two lectures, for them are agonizing
as they see these issues over and over again for two years.
1) Do
look over the slides of lecturers who are talking about related topics to your
lecturer.
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Helps a lot with keeping continuity through the course. It would be nice to not have you say, “I’m
not sure if you have been over this before or not.” If you are not sure, please look it up or
ask.
2) Don’t
ever say, “This will not be on the test.”
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Sometimes it is a minor point in your lecture, but it is a major point in a
prior lecture (again why it helps to talk to others) or a later lecture (maybe
even in the next block). OK to say, “This
is a minor point for the purposes of this lecture,” or “For this lecture, this
is primarily FYI.” We tell the students
that everything mentioned in class is potentially testable. If you don’t want us to potentially test it,
don’t mention it at all. If you must say this, talk to the course director to be sure it REALLY will not be on the test.
3) Try to stay away from disclosure slide
jokes.
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The first person who puts up the “I am actively looking for people to give me
money so I can disclose it” slide is funny.
The next five are not so much.
4) Please know how much time your lecture is
scheduled for, and try to stick to that.
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Our general lecture block time is 50 minutes.
In general, we plan our lectures to end 10 minutes prior to the next
lecture. So if your lecture is at 10,
you should plan to be done by 10:50. If
you bleed over, this makes everyone behind you have to modify their talks. If you have a lot of slides left, and are
running short on time, consider stopping where you are at, and recording the
end of the lecture to be posted online.
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If you are the last lecturer of the day, it is OK to keep going (within
reason). However, please announce that
it is OK for students who need to leave to be able to get up and go. Some students have tight commute times to get
to community preceptor sites by 1 PM or have to walk across campus to do OSCE
testing over the noon hour. Also keep in
mind that there are noon talks which occur periodically in the lecture hall.
5) If you are not skilled at PP or basic
functions of the audio/visual equipment, please learn minimum functions.
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For PP, you should be able to start and stop your presentation, restart from the middle of a presentation, go
backwards and forwards using only keyboard, understand what the purpose of a
right click is, start and stop video presentations, be able to disengage
auto-advancing of slides.
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For A/V, you should be able to turn on and off overhead projector, mute/ unmute
the screen, turn on/off the mic, Turn
mic up/ down using front panel controls.
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If you are uncomfortable with this, talk to TSO, and they can help you learn
how to do these things.
6) Do feel free to experiment with audience
participation techniques.
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Using clickers for in-lecture quizzing, use of pause for students to work
through a problem together, and other techniques are great ways to get students
involved in the lecture.
